I rub at my face with the back of my hand. The mascara from last night, which I apparently didn't fully remove, does what mascara does.
The apartment smells like rain and wet paper and the particular cold of a space that's been opened to elements it wasn't built to receive. My own scent, underneath all of it—honey and vanilla, muted almost to nothing, the lime zest completely absent for the first time in recent memory. My body has nothing left to broadcast. Whatever the scent suppressor didn't flatten, the night has.
I look at the book in my hands.
"Who has a vendetta against you?"
I look up.
Rowan is standing in the doorway.
Still there. His coat is wet from the rain—has been since he got out of the car for the umbrella—and the black pepperand ink and dark chocolate scent of him reaches me even across the apartment, even through the water-smell, a warm and grounding presence in the middle of a room that has gone entirely wrong.
His expression is—I was right about him in the car. The specific neutrality he wears isn't coldness, I understand now from this closer read. It's control. The expression of someone who feels things and has learned to keep the feeling and the showing of it on separate tracks, and right now the track for feeling it is running at full capacity and he's holding the expression in place through discipline rather than absence.
Something in his jaw. Something in the dark eyes.
The sound that comes out of me is more sob than laugh this time, and I let it—the effort of holding everything at the right register has expired and I don't have the reserves to renew it. "The world, it seems."
I close the book. Set it on the wet floor. And because Rowan is still standing in the doorway with that controlled, watchful expression and the rain is still coming through the ceiling and the book that was going to get me through the next week is ruined and there is literally nothing left to hold back behind, I start talking.
"My pack," I say. My voice has the particular quality of something that's been through a lot tonight and isn't going to perform steadiness anymore. "They left. Not the normal kind of leaving. The kind where you architect the exit—you set up the structure so that when you go, everything owes on stays behind, in the name of the person you're leaving, and you walk out clean."
Rowan hasn't moved from the doorway.
"Fifty thousand dollars," I say. "That's what they left me. Their debt, their decisions, their gambling losses and bad contracts and the particular financial creativity of three Alphaswho understood that the documentation didn't care whose idea the spending was—only whose name was on the liability. And they made sure mine was. Made sure it comprehensively was. Because they knew before they left. They planned it."
The tears are still going. I'm not stopping them now. The mascara situation is beyond intervention.
"The phone calls are every day. Twice on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Six in the morning, because the system doesn't care about sleep and the people running the system have learned that the early call reaches people before they've built their armor for the day. I've heard the same voice read the same script enough times that I could deliver it myself. I could stand behind a desk and call someone at six AM and read the outstanding balance with the same bland institutional patience and I hate that I know it that well."
Rowan has stepped fully inside. I haven't tracked the movement—I'm looking at the book on the floor—but his presence has shifted and he's in the apartment now, in the rain-cold room, the dark chocolate scent of him closer than it was.
"I came here because it was small," I say. "Small and quiet and the kind of town where a person can be invisible for long enough to figure out what to do next. Oakridge Hollow. Where people don't know my name yet and the history hasn't followed me and I could just—work. Work and save and try to calculate some version of the way out. I thought?—"
I stop.
Because the thought that follows is the one I've never said out loud, not to Elowen, not to Danny, not in the quiet of the apartment at 2 AM when the collectors' most recent call is still fresh. The one I've been keeping behind everything else because saying it makes it real in a way that thinking it doesn't.
"I have a dream," I say. Quietly. The way you say the things that matter most—not with emphasis, with the particular careof something that you've held close enough that it's warm from the contact. "A bar. My bar. Not someone else's where I use my hands and my knowledge to build their thing and go home to my ancient phone and my mop and my eleven books and start again tomorrow. Mine. Where the drinks are right and the room is safe and an Omega can walk in alone and the room doesn't question it. Where I know every person who comes through the door well enough to have their usual ready before they ask." I look at the bookshelf—empty now, the wood bare. "The Lucky Clover Lounge. I've had the name for two years. I have the menu mostly built in my head. I know the supplier relationships I'd need and the licensing requirements and the first year's staffing structure. I know everything about it except how to actually make it happen, because making it happen requires money I don't have and will never have at this rate because every dollar I manage to save gets calculated against the interest accruing on the debt and the math never works out."
My voice breaks slightly on the last part.
"And my family," I add, because I'm saying the things I don't say and I might as well go all the way. "They have opinions about how this situation reflects on them. About what it means that their daughter is in this position. My mother spent years making sure I could function in rooms I had no business being in—the etiquette, the languages, the dancing—because an Omega's value, in her framework, is her ability to attract the right situation and the right situation is determined by the quality of the pack. And I picked badly. And that's what they see. Not the debt, not the manipulation, not the three men who built an exit strategy around leaving me liable. Just: she picked badly."
The rain through the ceiling.
My soaked books on the floor.
The specific, final sound of something that has been barely holding its shape giving up on the last of it.
"I have a best friend who would write the check tonight if I asked her," I say. "No strings, no judgment, she means it entirely. And I can't ask her. I won't. Because I came to Oakridge Hollow alone and I'm going to fix this alone, which is either integrity or pride or stubbornness, and I know all three are possible and I can't tell them apart right now. But Danny—my boss—he gives me shifts that shouldn't be profitable for him, sets out a coffee mug before I arrive so I don't have to ask, hung my competition plaques on his wall without telling me he was going to do it. He believes in something I've been trying not to believe in about myself because believing in it and then not achieving it is worse than just not believing in it at all."
I press the heel of my hand against my cheekbone. The mascara is doing what it's doing and I've stopped caring.
"And then there's Elvin, who is a genuinely good person who has been building up to something for six months and tonight watched a stranger get on his knees on a bar floor and I couldn't give him that—couldn't give any version of it—because what Elvin wants is gratitude and gentleness and I'm not in a place where I have enough of either to spare. I'm running on the minimum and I can't give people what they need from me right now and I hate that. I hate being insufficient for people who are kind."
More tears.
